This horror game built from the bones of an abandoned FPS server and an accidental ARPG might be one of the strangest puzzlers I’ve ever played

Before I played No Players Online, I knew nothing about it, except that it was a horror game set in a server for an abandoned multiplayer FPS. In some ways it is exactly that, but in others it is not really that at all. If that description seems confounding, then it is only accurate to my experience with this deeply strange game, which is at once a fairly derivative horror experience and one of the oddest puzzlers I’ve ever played.

Even the history of No Players Online is confusing. I’ve been vaguely aware of the game for years, but it turns out that the No Players Online I was familiar with is not the No Players Online I just played. The commercial version that launched late last year and costs $15 is based upon a free, short game released back in 2019, developed by Adam Pype with sound design by Viktor Kraus and additional art by Ward Dheer.

Like the new version, the original game centred around an abandoned FPS server, with the player partaking in a solo round of capture the flag as strange events unfolded. Available for free on itch, No Players Online proved unexpectedly popular, to the point that a small Easter Egg Pype added to the game convinced fans that No Players Online had hidden depths.

As it happens, it didn’t. But Pype seized the opportunity, adding secrets and extras in and around the game, riffing on the mysteries its community had imagined. This culminated in an ARG that involved supplementary games and a poem hidden in the depths of the real forests of Belgium.

The commercial version of No Players Online, which has been in development since 2023, builds the experience out even further. Now the eerie multiplayer shooter sits at the heart of an experience that’s a little bit Her Story, a little bit Hypnospace Outlaw, a little bit Slenderman, and maybe, just maybe, a fragment of something you’ve never played before.

Where the original No Players Online was ‘contained’ in a virtual cassette tape, the experience now takes place within a simulated desktop PC. Inside, you’ll find a simulacrum of the late ’90s PC experience, back when computers were beige, monitors were chunky, and the internet was a million cool websites rather than six cursed ones that feed on human souls.

Within this PC, there’s a basic desktop file system, a sliver of pre-social media internet that lets you access a website where you can download games, an MSN Messenger-style chat program, and even a replica of Minesweeper. Everything will be familiar to a ’90s PC gamer. That is, except for the dates you’ll see in the game’s fake emails and websites, which are all thirty years too early for the simulated tech you interact with.

After messing around for a few minutes, you’re invited via chat to play the nameless multiplayer shooter that formed the focal point of the original No Players Online. Here, though, your solo CTF round kicks off a much larger mystery that delves into the origins of the shooter and its seemingly brilliant creator.

I’m going to try to avoid too many spoilers about the details of that mystery. But the system through which you solve it is fascinatingly bizarre. See, the multiplayer shooter is far from the only game you can access via the PC. Alongside the Minesweeper clone, there is a simple game involving a clock, a truly terrible 2D action game about killing fish with a knife, a dating sim you can only access using a dodgy keygen program, and several others.

All these games are either partially or fully playable, but individually, none of them will help you solve the mystery. But there’s also a program that lets you essentially splice two games together, creating a new experience out of the combined code of both programs.

It’s incredibly odd, and frankly, No Players Online doesn’t do the best job of explaining how the system works. It also only lets you splice games that have sufficiently matching codebases, a somewhat arbitrary reason to explain why some games splice and some don’t. Nonetheless, figuring out which games go together is entertaining in its own right, and the results are always interesting.

Moreover, the results of synthesising feeds back into that empty multiplayer shooter, carrying the story forward in intriguing ways. One thing I particularly enjoyed about No Players Online is how it uses the surreality of gamedev environments to great effect—both stylistically and mechanically. At various points, you progress by exploiting glitches in 3D geometry and solving puzzles shaped like debug menus. It reminds me of The Magic Circle in some ways, although its puzzles are less open-ended.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the direction the story takes. While NPO has the trappings of analogue horror, there’s a surprisingly human core to its tale that is, at times, quite touching. This is fortunate because, as a horror game, I found No Players Online to be quite rote and unremarkable. The game is undoubtedly at its weakest when it veers toward that Slenderman-style of first-person horror where a glitchy, creepy thing tries to jump scare you, like a gramophones playing distorted records and shadowy figures getting in your face.

A lack of scares might seem like a fatal flaw for a horror game. But No Players Online does so many other interesting things that I think it escapes the problem of its frights falling flat. There’s sufficient heft to its story and ingenuity to its puzzles that it doesn’t need to instil fear to be interesting. And while it brushes against a lot of the tropes that have developed within analogue horror and the whole ‘investigating a cursed PC’ premise, the experience which results from that has enough novelty to help it stand out.